And an engagement with things that are considered somewhat marginal to or provocatively on the side of the aesthetic: food; the Klingberg mandala -- disturbing but not in the usual ways; products, shoppinglooking at issues of consumption and taste consumerism possibility space

Joe: it’s a nice segue from the previous Catastrophe cluster presentation. The group formed as a way of thinking about how artists think about energy in a variety of media. Before I even knew I had an interest in this, as an arts writer reviewing various shows around town, I realized I had stumbled into an interesting network.

Andrei Molodkin, Crude: I encountered his work at the Station, a gallery that presents works directly engaging sociopolitical themes.

He served as a Soviet soldier guardian oil convoysCold War II: text and images of his worklong trips for food, heating: slathering bodies in excess crude just to stay warmcirculation of oil >> his practice oil pumping through various figures and lettersmovie: popping of compressors, series of letters filling with oilabandoned gas station with “revolution” in Russian written outside

Yes we can / Fuck you (and other phrases)figures of Christ flushed with oilhand of the Statue of Liberty (all encased in plastics << oil)

Pincus; energy versus fuelart materiality, crude

Statue of Liberty headgun shot like compressors: oil appearing and disappearing all around you <> hypnosis

Diverseworks, Marina Zurkow

Necrocracy: rule of the dead, the dead being hydrocarbonsthe sinkhole in Wink Texas--the video makes noises!

Mitchell Center for the arts and the Center for Land Use InterpretationHouston as the hub of a massive energy network, production distribution commerceart can be understood in a similar way

Joe realized that this kind of art did have something to do with him...

Energy: Overdevelopment and the Illusion of Endless Growthonly references to the arts are << simplistic beauty and ugliness

art <> PR and beauty <> positive change: too simplistic

Clean Coal ads! the ripped semi-nakednessGE energy ad. “Harnessing the power of coal is looking more beautiful every day”ecomaginationsexy and griminess--very sexy, a very complex range of pleasure and disgust

30th Anniversary of Koyaanisqaatsi: Reggio and scores by Philip Glassslow motion, time lapse, other forms of landscape cinematography

humiliation of language; different modes require different types of communication

two years of energy arts: first theme is consumptionsecond theme is urban geographies

back to Marina Zurkow; inadvertent fascinations and attachmentsis this simply decline? no-growth economywhat is it to anticipate enervation

Neo/Geo 1-IV, schematics of an oil drill; small room that felt like a discoa set of algorithms producing: a drill goes down and sometimes finds oil...beauty << ugly

hazmat suits for kids: a disturbing scale; might make you laugh

the hydrocarbons horribly multiplied

Mesocosm: extensions in time, things just go on, but it’s markedly different because of the slow thinking

virtual ecosystem simulationsforcing you to think about the forms of attention you pay to things

Petroleum manga bannersour plan is to print up a bunch of themtake, modify, and send backTyvek helps with endurance

Outside the Work (a translation of “hors d’oeuvre”)

invasive species tasting by Zurkowapproaching these questions through food

Tim will teach an undergraduate course on consumption and ecology

Derek: Zurkow likes to play with the cutedifferent from industrial pollution landscapes eg Burtynsky’s huge tire pilesis the feeling of depression or the sublime the only thing that’s useful?2014-2015: course about the geography of Houston itselfCenter for Land Use Interpretation: a bit like land art; drawing on Herzog; New Topographic photographersinteresting maps and index cards in the land use database: photos and a brief description of what it issince 1994PetroscapeTexas Oil: Landscape of an industryCynthia Woods Mitchell Centerarchive of different viewing devicesas viewing windows on the urban geography of Houstondisarming naivete: no gloss between a river and river of slag

Aynne KokasTrader Joe’sAnthropomorphic Map of Houston, hyperlocal project--a forty mile walk broken up into 4 mile chunkswalking with the two artists in hazmat suitsThe Human Tournot exactly lovely: looks more like a near future dystopiaLight Surgeons: Cynthai Woods Mitchell Center. British artists. Super Everything piece. Houston: Energize project; could be synchronous with ZurkowShrimp Boat project, Galveston Bay--adjacent to the refineries. Allows artists and scholars to go on a shrimp boat and spend the day“hyperlocal flows”Aynne’s course in the fall called Global Environmental Media: section on Houston

Q: what about the commodified, sellout qualities (I’m paraphrasing this question) of the geographical work? me: there is the lineage of Situationism and Psychic GeographyAynne: the shrimp project is when you encounter it not to do with exploitation, but rather working with artists whose livelihood is in fact shrimping

Gwen Bradford: what are the aesthetic themes here, digging deeper? Joe: ennervationDerek: history of materialsme: coexistence and boredom (plus the more immediate anxiety)

Joe: what are you thinking of? (to the audience)

Gwen: at least two mentioned the theme of scale and complexity, the befuddlement of looking at how the world is changing so quickly; we are massively outstripped as individualsJameson: the tools of philosophy grew up in a simpler time and now we need new tools for understanding how individuals interact

Derek: that is a good point. If you want to be aware of where you waste goes it does get really hard to delimit what an action is

Q: kitsch. Form. The culturally peripheral forms that they tarry with like the manga. The vernacular. Vernacular landscapes in architecture. Vernacular formal dimension of this stuff too? Representational stuff. Forms that are adequate to the landscapes that are being looked at. It stands to reason that they would be hybrid or unauthorized? “Bad” or depreciated forms. Our efforts to be adequate to eco. Versus the deadly serious earnestness--to open up modalities of art that just that.

Derek: that’s one reason I want to play with the CLUI model.

Alexander: I wonder about something. Videos, photographs, printouts. There is a relationship between forms of innovation and the possibility of scale that has something to do with reproducibility. The idea that Zurkow would be everywhere on campus. Or the idea of going to a specific place.

Joe: the form question is very complex. The odd neutrality of the manga. The odd schematic neutrality of the manga and the kitsch objects. There is a weird relation between those things. The odd ubiquity of Mesocosm: they are not identical << algorithms computing. They would be similar environments playing out different possibilities.

Alexander: assumptions about what art works. It’s not like the sublime is over--but there might be something else going on and the way one imagines scale or innovation.

Joe: it wouldn’t be about rejecting all aesthetic terms. Even the simple ones presented problems for description. Hopefully it will be interesting to see them become more nuanced and complicated.

Derek: a lot of the CLUI pieces are too large to put in a museum.

Alexander: but that’s it, right? The point would be to go out and see it. It seems counterproductive to take photographs--because you can’t reproduce it.

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Imagine There's No Biosphere

Being Ecological (Penguin, out now)

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

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Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

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“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci